ENCINITAS: Walmart expected to open this summer

Walmart
Corp. expects to open its first Encinitas store this summer, a company spokeswoman said Thursday.

Renovation work on the site --- a former Home Expo building along Leucadia Boulevard that's sat vacant for several years ---- is proceeding as planned, spokeswoman Delia Garcia said.

"We're planning early summer of this year, so in just a few more months," spokeswoman Delia Garcia said as she discussed the future store's opening day.

The new store is going into the Encinitas Ranch shopping center just west of Leucadia Boulevard's intersection with El Camino Real. The center is known for its REI recreational equipment store, which contains a rock-climbing wall. The center also houses a Starbucks coffee shop and a gas station, among other businesses.

Walmart's plans to join the center have met with
mixed reaction,
both from residents and from the city's elected leadership.

Several nearby homeowners declared their opposition to the proposal many months ago when word first surfaced that Walmart was eyeing the property. They have said the addition of a Walmart along Leucadia Boulevard will add significantly more traffic to a roadway that's already heavily traveled.

Other opponents include small-business advocates who say the giant discount retailer will cause great financial harm to locally owned stores.

Councilwoman Teresa Barth has said the city would be better served if a movie theater went into the old Home Expo building.

Supporters have countered that Walmart is providing less-costly goods that people want to buy and is bringing new life to a long-vacant building.

Mayor Jerome Stocks and council members James Bond and Kristin Gaspar told opponents at a
council meeting last fall
that Walmart has the right to use the building ---- it's a commercial structure ---- and opponents should decide for themselves whether to shop there.

Walmart received its city permit to renovate the building in September. The company now is "extensively" remodeling the interior to accommodate refrigeration equipment and other store needs, Garcia said.

Part of that renovation work involves reducing the current building's square footage in order to meet city parking space requirements. When Home Expo occupied the structure it got special city permission for fewer parking spaces because many of its customers had their purchases delivered to their homes, city planning officials have said.

Under the terms of its permit, Walmart must wall off and leave vacant 8,664 square feet of the 104,759-square-foot building. That will give it a store that's slightly larger than 96,000 square feet ---- significantly smaller than the company's three nearest stores in Oceanside.

The two Oceanside Walmarts that are close to Highway 78 are each about 133,000 square feet, while the third store near Highway 76 is 154,000 square feet, Garcia said. The Encinitas Target store, in a shopping center directly across the street from the city's future Walmart, is about 140,000 square feet, the city's planning director has said.

Garcia said Thursday that the new Walmart may be smaller than the ones in Oceanside but it still will be called a Supercenter, "so it will have groceries in addition to general merchandise."

It will also have a pharmacy, a garden equipment sales area, and sales space for electronics, clothing and toys, she said.

"The goal of the shopping center is one-stop shopping convenience," she said.